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Wisconsin State Agricultural Society. 
change the flora of the country; and it seems probable- that the 
last of these races must have finally become extinct on the lowest 
levels in the territory nearest to the sea; always granting that the 
climate remained mildest in that belt of coast, as in theory it would 
have been. 
It is worthy of note, too, in this connection, that man, the future 
tiller of the soil, made his appearance at a period coeval with these 
gigantic animal creations—that the primitive race lived with, grew, 
culminated, and doubtless finally went out of existence with them, 
or at a period not much later. Under the name of u mound-build¬ 
ers, 1: modern scientific writers place in one group, races of man¬ 
kind whose ancestry may have reached back a thousand centuries; 
and comprise man, the semi-animal, in the same classification with 
man, the intellectual and at least partially civilized being. We 
may be sure that the human race, for a long period after it came 
upon the stage, was not made up of workers—that they lived amidst 
an abounding plenty—that, in the sense of rational beings, their 
lives were as indolent as worthless; and that they only reached 
mental activity and improvement by a long process of training in 
the rugged school of privatiou and suffering. The beginning and 
the ending of the mound-building races was doubtless strikingly un¬ 
like, for we find, toward the close, that they were undoubtedly an 
agricultural if not pastoral people, living in organized societies, 
subject to government, and capable of accomplishing great and dur¬ 
able public monuments. 
There is not lacking evidence that our prairies and forest-lands were 
cultivated for ages by teeming millions of human beings, long anteri¬ 
or to the arrival of the red man. By comparison, indeed, the Indian is 
completely modern. In what manner the mound-builders finally be¬ 
came extinct can only be surmised; but if, as some suppose, it was 
by conquest by a superior race, that race itself also disappeared be¬ 
fore the Indian came in, leaving neither mark nor monument to 
attest its existence. It seems more reasonable to believe that this 
primitive people died out in the same way, and under the same con¬ 
ditions, that finally exterminated the elephant and mastodon—a 
change in physical condition which they did not possess sufficient 
vitality to resist. They were tropical men, and could not survive an 
arctic temperature. That these nations emigrated southward and 
became merged with the Aztecs, is much less probable than that 
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